Intergalactic courtesies

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A space ambassador to welcome alien visitors? Just a
cock-and-bull story

It is not yet the war of the worlds but just a war between
newspapers. The Sunday Times,
the Telegraph, the
New York Post have been subjects to a
Sunday hallucination last 26th September. All of
them have reported the news that the astrophysicist Mazlan
Othman, head of the UN office Unoosa, was to be appointed the
first point of contact with aliens in case of extraterrestrial
contact. A preparation to the third kind encounters that has caused
a tam tam on hundreds of web sites and blogs all over the
world.

Only Monday morning the Guardian editorial staff
took the trouble to give a call to the scientist who, with great
humour, said she would have been enthusiastic if only the news was
true.

A
cock-and-bull story the one on which many journalist have stumbled.
Maybe behind the joke there is an Orson Welles'
fan: it was the 1938 when the director sparked the panic in the US
just announcing through his radio emission that the Martians were
landed on the Earth.